Many of our customers use Informatica’s AI-Powered Data Catalog for a variety of their enterprise data journeys – Data Lakes, Cloud, Enterprise Data Governance, Self-service Analytics and many more. We are proud to be a critical partner in their data journeys, helping them to succeed.

Organizations are building data strategies and architectures that will fuel their data-driven digital transformation initiatives. As many companies embark on different data journeys, many now recognize that data is the new currency of this century. Data volumes are exploding and figuring out how to spend this currency is not a trivial task. To manage the spending, you need to know in what form it exists, what is coming in, what is going out, who is spending it and how they are spending it.

Let’s take an example. A Wall Street journal article estimated that 50% to 80% of any data project is spent on data discovery and data prep. Based on my discussion with our customers, a majority of their time is spent on understanding – what is out there and what can they use to drive analytics and new business initiatives. Imagine building a data lake and not delivering value from that investment.

Oftentimes, the challenge is about the types and kinds of data that should be brought into the lake, and how to leverage insights from the lake. A Data Catalog is the answer. It’s like a GPS that will provide the enterprise data landscape map. A data lake will be more valuable with added data cataloging and collaborative self-service data preparation capabilities applied to that data. And it becomes an intelligent data lake that enables raw big data to be systematically transformed into fit-for-purpose data sets for a variety of data consumers.

A data catalog is not just for data lake journey. It will help anyone in the organization to discover data assets and maximize the value from data initiatives. A data catalog will enable organizations to catalog and classify any types of data anywhere, so it can be leveraged by both IT and Business for analytics, governance and other data initiatives. It provides a unified metadata view of enterprise data assets which will include technical, business, operational and usage metadata. Imagine if that enterprise data catalog has google-like search and is powered by AI – that is like having an AI-powered GPS – it will intelligently catalog data assets, recognize domains and entities, perform data similarity, provide data lineage, enables certification by stewards. It solves many of the key problems of finding trusted, relevant data organizations have today and maximizes the value of enterprise data assets – a critical component for any of these journeys. To learn more about Informatica’s intelligent Data Catalog, visit here.